Last week between the rosé-fueled networking sessions and adtech-funded yacht parties at the Cannes Lions Festival, Coca-Cola and Ogilvy bagged a Grand Prix in the print and publishing category for “Recycle Me.”
The winning campaign features striking images of the classic Coca-Cola logo on a bright red background as it appears after a can has been crushed—with the outline of the can itself cut from the picture. Below the image, it says simply, “Recycle Me,” translated for the relevant market.
But not everyone thought Coca-Cola crushed it.
Some marketers and climate activists have condemned the decision, accusing the festival of rewarding greenwashing. They argue that crushing cans goes against some guidance from recyclers and distracts from Coca-Cola’s overall impact on the environment without addressing the more pressing issue of plastic pollution.
One senior marketer at a holding company-owned agency, speaking on condition of anonymity after returning home from Cannes, described the pick as “generally laughable, even outside of sustainability circles.” Calling the win “ironic,” they said it contributed to a “growing mistrust” of the awards overall.
Sustainability stumbles in Cannes
Describing the work as “iconic,” and an “inspiration,” jury president John Raúl Forero said it met the requirements he and his fellow jurors were looking for in the category. Forero declined to comment on the backlash.
“It is a campaign that, due to its simplicity, power in the image, elegance, purity in the graphics and power in the message, represented exactly what we were looking for,” Forero said. “We wanted to somehow reclaim the strength that classic print can have.”
For marketing professionals and climate activists in the audience during the Cannes Lions Festival, some felt that awarding Coca-Cola for recycling efforts, given the company’s production of single-use plastics and outsized impact on global plastic pollution, erodes industry confidence in the organizers.
“It’s a beautiful, creatively crafted ad, but it reeks of green lighting—putting the emphasis on [Coca-Cola’s] not-so-bad packaging vs. doing something meaningful about the 3 million tons of plastic packaging it produces a year,” said Jo Balchin, sustainability strategist at agency Enviral. “Wouldn’t it be refreshing for Coca-Cola to take its vast marketing budget and invest it in better packaging solutions and undoing the great damage it has caused, then tell this story? It would be a far better story to tell.”
“We are using Coca-Cola’s iconic and globally recognized logo to send a powerful message about recycling and to bring consumers along in the journey,” a spokesperson said. “The ‘Recycle Me’ campaign helps promote the idea that sustainability is a collective responsibility and to encourage recycling by all.”
The Cannes Lions Festival has implemented some sustainability efforts in recent years, including allowing awards entrants to include details related to the carbon footprint of a campaign’s development, production and distribution. Still, sustainability-related information isn’t yet incorporated into the scoring of different pieces of work.
“We know that the climate crisis is one of the most pressing issues that our industry and world faces today,” a spokesperson for Cannes Lions said. “Our commitment is that every edition of Cannes Lions will be the most sustainable it’s ever been.”
Climate activists argued that the campaign amounted to greenwashing by putting the responsibility of the brand’s single-use packaging back on the consumer, and by shifting focus away from the larger plastic pollution problem.
“The judges of these awards are experts in creativity and may benefit from collaborating with experts in other areas to make sure these projects reflect the best possible thinking on key sustainability questions,” Duncan Meisel, executive director at Clean Creatives, told ADWEEK.
Should cans even be crushed?
The message of the campaign seems to encourage consumers to crush the cans before recycling them—something that the U.S. EPA and recyclers advise against.
“Crushing cans can hinder the recycling process,” Katie Drews, co-president and CEO at Eureka Recycling, told ADWEEK. “We use mechanical processes that are designed to sort recyclables based on their size, shape, and weight. […] Cans that don’t maintain some of their natural dimensionality can be mistaken for—or get buried under—paper and other materials.”
That creates a twofold problem, she explained. First, it can lead to contamination in bales of the materials that flattened cans are mistaken for, and second, that means the municipal recycling facility (MRF) loses some of its most valuable material.
While recyclers like Eureka value the role brands can play in encouraging recycling through investments, packaging design and messaging, this campaign is an example of sustainability becoming “a strategic arm of marketing, rather than marketing being a strategic arm of sustainability,” Drews said.
Across the board, activists and sustainability-minded marketers told ADWEEK that wins like Coca-Cola’s support a growing sentiment that the ad industry at large isn’t taking the climate crisis seriously.
“The awards categories at Cannes haven’t developed. They still have very vague, general definitions of what impact is,” said Lucy von Sturmer, founder and CEO of nonprofit Creatives for Climate, calling the festival “a playground to legitimize business as usual.”
Written by Kathryn Lundstrom ~
